Creative Bulletin n.1 (12.10.19)
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Do you know why our publishing house is called Sefirot?
It was named after Matteo’s cat, who died two days before our appointment with the notary for setting up the company. Andrea immediately showed to be the best partner and accepted the name.
Our logo comes from this painting Matteo made when he lived in China (he missed the cat).
We started the bulletin this way since we wanted to share something authentic.
Then… how was our week?
🐐🐐🐐 Things we have done:
Andrea guaranteed us a good contract with a fulfillment and shipping company. This will allow us to improve the service towards our clients (for now we are doing everything ourselves from a small warehouse in Alessandria, Italy and for sure it’s not our cup of tea!)
We defined the deal with the artist who is going to work with us on Fabula4Kids so we can unveil him: he is Matteo “Ufocinque” Capobianco and we fell in love! Check out what he does and you’ll love him too ==> https://www.instagram.com/ufocinque/
Matteo had to deal with international invoicing, a challenge that could be compared only to: 1) an impossible multi-level arcade 2) a Ken Follett’s trilogy 3) Kafka’s process, and that provided him with several nightmares where an accountant called Mary was telling him everything was to be redone entirely. Of course Mary doesn’t exist!
Happy ending: we solved everything!
🦐🦐🦐 Things we want to do:
Instead of spending 2000€ for a small place during the Turin Book Fair (it’s like the Frankfurt one but only for Italy), we want to invest the same amount of money to organize a new event, during the evening, where to treat topics about Publishing and Creativity in a more practical way than during the Fair (and maybe to offer some wine too, that always helps! 😎). If you come up with some ideas, we’re brainstorming, let us know, please!
A series of animated gifs to answer all the Facebook comments from rude people (you have no idea how many!). Something like a cat saying: «Really!?» or «The mother of idiots is always pregnant».
We want a database of manufacturers. Till now we focused on cards, but we’d like to go beyond (for Fabula4Kids for instance we crave for a wooden dice!), so Matteo is mailing tons of companies in the USA, Poland, Germany, Spain, UK, China, and of course Italy 😍
🎃🎃🎃 Things we learned
The matter of international invoicing was truly heavy stuff. To be concise: Italian bureaucracy is not ready for e-commerce platforms selling outside the country, so it’s a mess and nobody seems to know anything. We were so desperate we were just moving the company to another country.
In the end Matteo made a phone call to one of the most important Italian independent publishers and begged for a consultancy with their administration. They were surprisingly very kind and solved all our issues in five minutes.
🌈 Takeaway: when you don’t have enough data, be humble and ask for help to everyone, even if you have to show you are pretty messed up.
See you next week!
With ❤️,
Matteo and Andrea from Sefirot
P.s.
A lot of you want more infos about our choice to build a creative community in Portugal. Here’s why: lots of entrepreneurs and professionals are moving over there because of the convenient fiscal policy; Lisbon is gaining thousands of great brains and well… we’d love to work in an environment like that!
Btw on New Year’s Eve we’ll be there with our girlfriends to check the mood, so if you happen to be there, let’s have a glass of wine!
P.p.s.
We’re trying to grow our Instagram channels. Maybe you didn’t even know they existed. If you follow us, that would be sweet 😅
https://www.instagram.com/fabuladeck/
